Songbird

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Nov 17, 2010

Some of you may have heard of Songbird seeing as how it recently made its appearance on Android. I myself use it. I was curious if anyone had ever heard of the desktop version of Songbird. It's been around for a couple of years now. As the owner of an Android device, it's kind of pointless for me to use iTunes, so naturally, I need to pick from the relatively well sized pool of alternatives. Being that I owned a bunch of Creative ZEN products prior to my switch to Android, I've used just about all of the most well known ones (Winamp, Media Monkey, Foobar2000, WMP, you name it).

I finally settled on Songbird. It's built on the same framework Firefox is built on (Gecko if my memory serves, its been a while since I used Firefox), and because of this, it has an add-on framework; which is very useful in a desktop media player. For instance, some add-ons I find particularly usefull are:

MLyrics - looks up lyrics of whatever song is playing and displays them in a pull out sidebar, and has auto-scroll.

The Last.fm - scrobbles all your plays to your profile without needing the Last.fm desktop app, as well as adds Love, Tag, and Ban controls right in the main player

Concerts - Tells you when any artist in your music library is on tour in your city (or major city nearby) by using Songkick.

New Releases - Tells you when any artist in your music library is releasing an album in the near future.

MashTape - pulls artist bio, photos, videos, an news from various internet sources for the current artist playing and displays it in a pull-out side bar.

7digital - complete integration between the Songbird player and the 7digital store (just like iTunes)

In addition to this, being a Gecko based program, it has a built in web browser in case you need to look stuff up right in the player. And of course it has a whole slew of other And of course its completely compatible with a whole slew of devices, including Android.

Been using the desktop app for a while, and now that they made a killer Android app, I use that too. Just thought maybe curious people wanted to give it a shot. I know people are really loyal to their music player apps, but I think you'll like it.

Here's some screenshots of mine. The first is with the bottom and side panes open running MashTape and MLyrics respectively. The Second is with both closed. The Last one is with the default "feather" on called "Purple Rain". I personally use Gonzo 2.0 (the first two screenshots). It was the default back when Songbird was in its 1.0 days, and I like it a bit better than the now default, Purple Rain. But there's slews of other cool looking feathers.